Sorry. I should have reported in before now! While waiting for my initial attempt to post the station to happen, I had a most helpful and informative e-mail report on my work from Fabio, who provided some very useful suggestions and tips for improving the model particularly in regard to polygon optimisation on the pipework and other areas that need attention including more detailed panelling work! Who am I to argue with THE man who made the original TLT show model! So I am currently going through the to-do list gradually and when that's finished I'll attempt to get the thing posted again after another round of beta testing.
Thanks for asking!

I'm not a great fan of too much ambient light in space renders. Especially when the main sunlight is coming from that direction. However, there are very low intensity blue fill lights illuminating the rear of the station and the dark side of E3. There are also strong specular lights.
Looks OK on my monitor and the gamma is calibrated often!

It's easier to draw on than explain, hope you don't mind. There's some odd lighting on B5 there. I've highlighted two things but there are more, like behind the docking ring. I think overall it could do with a little radiosity as well.

The panelling now completely covers the entire length of the superstructure top and bottom. The first image shows the close-up detail and the second shows the complete station as it stands at the moment. There are three scenes of varying resolutions - low, medium and high consisting of different interpolation values for the pipework. This is the high resolution version and has about 3.5M polygons total!
Very nearly finished the post-Beta to-do list!

Dont! It really does look great. You just need to add some more details... (runs away)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikala

I can see someone doing a fan edit with this subbing in for the old one!

Thanks for the comments!
The model is now undergoing another round of beta testing, the last I hope! Should be about another week before I try to upload it again. I know I've said that before but I can dream!
Ted

I thought I should provide a situation update for this model. It is finished as far as I am concerned (Hooray!). No doubt someone will find an error here and there but corrections will have to wait for a later version! Three beta test members have now got the model and I look forward to some great pics and animations. I sent a pm to Bob to pre-warn him that I am trying again to release it, probably to the Contributing Members section but to also give him the opportunity to add it to the Premier Content which may help him with a bit of income for the site. Perhaps I'm being somewhat presumptive that the model is actually good enough for that!

Unfortunately, I have not heard back from him yet and as before I am anxious to get this model off my to-do list, so in the meantime if there are any premier members who want it, pm me for a download link (80Mb Zip). If Bob doesn't want it for premier content then I will upload it to Contributing Members. Don't know if that will work either after the December attempt

Glad you can finally get it out the door so to speak Ted. I think your option of giving links to PM is probably better.

Download from here is very slow at the moment as you might have seen so using a third party is a good idea. Ive posted a pic on DA as well to let people know and also maybe to drag some people to F3D, i get the impression some think that F3D is pretty dead and i would like to change that.

Cant see any problems with it or errors. There are allot of non planer polys which im going to look into and try and quad or tri them. LWCAD has a good tool for this, i just hope it does not screw up the texture mapping.

Glad you can finally get it out the door so to speak Ted. I think your option of giving links to PM is probably better.

Download from here is very slow at the moment as you might have seen so using a third party is a good idea. Ive posted a pic on DA as well to let people know and also maybe to drag some people to F3D, i get the impression some think that F3D is pretty dead and i would like to change that.

Cant see any problems with it or errors. There are allot of non planer polys which im going to look into and try and quad or tri them. LWCAD has a good tool for this, i just hope it does not screw up the texture mapping.

Thanks again Ted.

Thanks for the feedback, John. I hope you manage to drive a few extra paying customers here. Then Bob may be able to get the speed up a bit!
As for the non-planars, that is one of the things that I obsess about with Lightwave. They seem to appear at times. I've just downloaded my own model and here is the pic of the stats of the whole number of layers and there are no non-planars at all:
Strange!